The BWCA-Boundary Waters Canoe Area of upper eastern Minnesota...sigh...

Mayan queen piercing tongue.

Back from 2 whole weeks with no internet connection and no cell phone signals! And it was glorious! Perfect weather (high 70s during the day, mid-60s at night), and sunshine most days, with clear nights for star-gazing. Not much northern lights, but can't have everything, right?

I was working on the sequel to my next book...more info on it below:--Note: this post appeared on the Sweet'n'sexydivas blogspot on my normal day of the 16th, in July. You might have missed it, so I'm reprinting it here...

I'm so excited! I just signed a contract for my next book to come out on November 1st, or as it's known in the Hispanic culture, El Dia de los Muertos. How appropriate when the major characters in Prophecy of the Undead are vampires! And one of them is Hispanic. The book also features a 5,000-year-old Mayan vampire and an impending alien re-visitation. Along the way to finishing this book the hero took a drastic change. The heroine was always going to be a black female neuro-biologist who is attempting to isolate and identify the hormone or enzyme in the human brain that is responsible for intelligence. I woke up from a dream over a year ago with part of her story having "played" for me as I slept. When I woke up I knew I had to write about her. But who does she fall in love with? Originally I was going to have her hero be a Native American doctor on a reservation in the north woods. In fact I had already written the first two chapters when I had another dream. In this one a tall Russian man with very white skin and platinum-blond hair "told" me that he was her hero. When I objected he grinned at me, flashing his vampire teeth, and said I had no other choice. I tried to explain to him that I don't want to write about vampire romance--it's too over-done. What else new can there be to say? He reminded me that the original story involved Mayans and their end-of-the-world prediction for 2012. I woke up with a desire to research the Mayan culture. What I learned was just how saturated with blood their culture was. Ancient Mayans believed humans had been put on earth to nourish the gods. Their religion involved lot of ritual sacrifices and blood-letting. One of the popular games ended with beheading the losing team. Obsidian knives and ropes with obsidian thorns imbedded in them were used by the king and his royal court to publicly pierce their own most sensitive places, like the earlobes, tongue, penis or labia, to bleed onto strips of paper or cloth in containers, which would then be burned as an offering to the gods. Why might their gods have demanded so much blood? Well, if they were vampires... The Mayan culture also featured unusually advanced aspects. There were maps showing the stars, views that could only be seen from space. They had mastered the concept of "zero" which even the Romans had not figured out yet. And there are all of those huge palaces and temples...were they all created by the sheer back-breaking labor of many slaves, or might they have had help? Perhaps from aliens?

This is the blurb for Prophecy of the Undead: Keisha is a neurobiology researcher determined to discover the secret to intelligence to save humanity from itself. What she learns leads her to realize a bigger threat comes from beyond the stars. Yuri is a Russian vampire whose long-dead feelings respond to the scientist whose brain he admires but whose curves he can't resist. Will his love reach the places in her heart that she has ignored for so long? And can they defeat the prophecy of the undead to find happiness sharing eternity?